Matt Chandler - God Sees and Knows

Good morning! How are you doing? Well, excellent! If you have your Bible, go ahead and grab those. If you don’t have your Bible, grab one of those hardback black ones somewhere around you. Kids, I want you to go ahead and grab a Bible as well. If you grab one of those hardback black ones, I’ll even tell you the page number to go to. So here we are in week six of our study of the book of Exodus, and like we’ve been talking about, we’ll be in Exodus through I believe May, though we could extend a little into June. We’ll see what the Lord has for us. Once you have your Bibles, if you’ve got the hardback black one, we’re going to be on page 46. Here’s how it works: the big number is the chapter, and the little number is the verse. So kids, if you have your Bible, you’re looking for a big two and a small 23. We’re going to look at three verses together today.

Now, a couple of things: first through fifth graders, I love family worship! We love that you are here with us. I think if we had the time, I could show you in the Bible where it lets us know, as moms and dads and other adults, that you bring something to us that we need. You have a joy, energy, and vibrancy that we tend to lose as we get older and crustier. For you to be here today is a big deal for us because God wants us to look at you and consider the energy, life, and joy you have as something He desires for us. He says that to enter the kingdom, we must come as little children. So that’s a really cool nugget from the Lord about your importance in the gathering of the household of faith, and I’m glad you’re here today.

Here’s my promise: I’m going to go for about 20 minutes, and you can do that. I know you can! I believe you can! Now, moms and dads, I know that first through fifth graders are in here, which means there might be some questions answered that I wasn’t really asking, and there may be a bit more squirming in the nest. Maybe you’ll have to flash a little evil eye over at your child for something. I get that! If you have a church background, your mama was probably giving you that look in the choir back in the day. So I understand you might have to look over at me like, «Oh no!» But I just want everybody to breathe out.

Now, moms and dads, singles, here’s what I want to throw out to you: these three verses are crucial; the whole book of Exodus turns on them. These aren’t verses like, «Oh, this would be an easy spot for Family Worship weekend.» They literally are the fulcrum on which the book of Exodus shifts. At this point, five weeks in, all we’ve really seen are Moses, Pharaoh, Egypt, Pharaoh’s daughter, and Moses' mother. You know who has been absent from the narrative, aside from seeing it retroactively? God. God has not presented Himself, He has not introduced Himself, and He has not spoken. We have seen nothing of God except in the background, sovereignly moving the pieces around. And yet today, He speaks! And especially next week, when we cover chapter three, which I’m already a little giddy about. But I’ll hold off until then.

Exodus chapter 2, we’re going to start in verse 23: «During those many days, the king of Egypt died, and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help. Then their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God, and God heard their groaning, and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. And God saw the people of Israel, and God knew.»

Now, three simple verses, and what I want to do is pull some things out of them and put them in front of us for us to consider. The first, and one I think is important for us to always know regardless of how old we are, is that the Bible never shies away from or tries to back away from the reality that people can hurt and be in pain. We see in this text that the people of God are groaning; they are hurting; they are crying out for help. People hurt; people can be sad; people can be angry; people can have their hearts broken. This is a reality that exists throughout the entire Bible. It should never surprise us when this happens.

Now, why? Well, people hurt because the world is broken. A lot of times when people are hurt, when they’re angry or sad, or when their hearts are broken, it’s because the world is broken. They are sick—that’s usually not anyone’s fault, right? When someone gets sick, they get sick because the world is broken. So we can hurt over that. Or they’re hurt because they’ve sinned against God, and there are consequences for that. Or a third reason we can be mad or sad and have broken hearts is that other people’s sin affects us. The Bible doesn’t shy away from the fact…